fractalnavel

have you heard of the big anti-globalization gathering in india ?  ok, fine - let's send everyone home and take our off-shored outsourcing dollars back.  oh, they meant culture ?  i see - they want global money sent to them, but they don't actually want to participate otherwise.  so, well, do they want our goods or not ?  if not, what are they going to do with all that money ?  oh, build their own stuff ?  then won't there be enough jobs over there already ? they won't need our money or our jobs. (“our“ ?)

oh wait, maybe they're _for_ globalization. ok, does that mean i'm allowed to move over there and take jobs from them ?  no ?  well, ok, can i work here for the same pay and buy the same basket of goods ?  no ?  then what are we talking about here ?

oh, _that_ - you mean the continuing concentration of wealth by top executives ?  but it's being sent overseas too, right ? doesn't it help those economies ?  but those economies are already polarized far worse than we are.  do you really think those funds are reaching the have-nots ? 

still believe in “trickle-down” economics ?  so you think your well being depends on the consumption habits of the wealthy ?  do you think that's a _good_ thing ?  so we should socialize, right ?  sure, lowest common denominator for everyone.  no ? what about elimination of greed ?  no ? but we're civilized, right ?  human ? something other than the animal and inanimate worlds ? 

it's not confusion you're experiencing, it's denial.

what's “the answer” ?  there is no “answer”.  the first step is to reject your illusion of consciousness and identity, and then act.  or not.

all is illusion. we are masters of that, no ? well, actually, no.  we let our current illusions get in the way of establishing new ones, maybe ones that are given to us from someone else.  so what is the purpose of deconstructing the illusions we have, of acknowledging the mechanistic consistency of underlying “is“-ness ?  perhaps only to allow us new illusions.  but what wonderful illusions we can make !  oneness with totality, we are already there, we understand all.  what need for preservation of a species beyond a minimum healthy gene pool ?  why “preserve” at all ?  or go the other way, become an ever growing seething mass, some uber-organism with  illusions of its own.  let us define separateness, and fight for unity, define oneness, and fight for identity.

que sera, sera.  we do not choose.  all is change and illusion.  accept that, and all our everyday silliness becomes clear.  stand aside from nationalist concerns, for one.  survive, or die, they are the same.  likely to lead to one's quick dissolution, but no matter.  the truest “consciousness” is denial of itself.  so i will follow my path, as all of us cannot help but do.

mumbo-jumbo, eh ? but to get “answers”, it makes more sense to deal with the deepest reality we can find.  like medicine, symptoms can be treated, or the underlying disease, or prevention of even that, and ever further up the causal chain.  so to try and attempt to manipulate events - our lives, our world - at face value is to accept failure.  we even kid ourselves about the results of our attempts, so we cannot accurately judge.  the trick is not to be balked by complexity, today's analog of the unknown forces in the universe that caused our ancestors to invent gods and morals.  science “succeeds” where it has because of its hyper simplicity, so far.  but we still create myths at the edges of our reason, no different than ever.  no doubt prehistoric gods seemed just as reasonable to our forebears as our enlightened rationalism does to us today, with its concepts of freedom and consciousness and so on.

so, what to do, what to do...  all i've really said is that i have no idea in a conventional sense, so maybe it's time to look at things from an unconventional perspective.  with all the apparent contradictions and paradoxes in the way things stand today, perhaps a higher level of abstraction is called for; think godelian incompleteness.  then look for assumptions and constraints, especially implicit ones, and see what happens when we breach them.

uh, “think outside the box” ;-)